It became the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. I do not know whether Father Linares saw it again or not, but I do know that while it lived there in the sea it lost the claws and forked tongue and the evil smell. It was then that Father Linares commanded it in the name of God to disappear into the sea and remain there, which it obediently did. It roamed our land back and forth and where it went the crops would wither and die and the air was foul. That was the time when the Manta Diablo was a thing with claws and a forked tongue. For it was he who first saw him, more than a hundred years ago. It is possible that if Father Linares were living today he could tell us the truth. Yet, I say to you, that of all the old men and the mothers and even my grandfather, not one has been able to give a true picture of the Manta Diablo. He had seen the Manta Diablo several times both at night and in the daytime, so he said, and his descriptions were nearer the truth as I know it. He could read and use a pen and recite long poems right out of his memory. My grandfather was the most learned man in our town. He was a somewhat different monster from the one my mother knew, for he had more teeth or less or eyes shaped in a different way or only a single eye instead of seven. Mothers of my friends also threatened them with the Manta Diablo. With these teeth he would snap my bones like sticks. He had seven rows of teeth in his mouth, each tooth as long as my father’s Toledo knife. His eyes were the color of ambergris and shaped like a sickle moon and there were seven of them. She told me that he was larger than the largest ship in the harbor of La Paz. I am now sixteen, but when I was younger and did things I should not have done, my own mother said to me solemnly, Ramón, if you do this thing again I shall speak a word to the Manta Diablo. Mothers seek to frighten bad children by threatening to call from the deeps of the sea this fearsome giant. Old men around the fires at night tell their grandsons of the meetings they have had with him. There are many people in the town of La Paz and in Baja California who say they have seen the Manta Diablo. And of the two, only one is alive - I, Ramón Salazar. But of these thousands only two have really seen him. There are many who live in the great world outside who have heard of him also, I am told. EVERYONE who lives in our town of La Paz, or along the far coasts or among the high mountains of Baja California, has heard of the Manta Diablo.
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